Alumni Notes & Newsmakers

In November, Norman Dorsen ’53 delivered the Harvard Law School Association of New Jersey’s 57th Vanderbilt Lecture. The topic was “Seeking Civil Liberties,” and that’s something the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union has done throughout his career.

Offering humorous quips and reflecting on his always challenging role as chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein ’78 discussed his company, regulation and the state of the economy, as part of a question-and-answer session with Dean Martha Minow during Reunions Weekend in October.

Shortly after graduating from HLS, David Satterthwaite Wertime ’07 and Rachel Lu ’07 launched Tea Leaf Nation, an e-magazine focusing on Chinese social media. The site had become a go-to destination for Western journalists, academics and decision-makers seeking insights into what average Chinese people are thinking.

In 2007, Corey Stoughton ’02 began a long, serpentine journey through New York courts when she filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 20 criminal defendants claiming the state’s public defender system had failed them. If all goes as scheduled, Stoughton, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union, will be in an Albany courtroom in March, when the case finally goes to trial.

just 24 years old, Maeve O’Rourke LL.M. ’10 went to the United Nations with a bold and unprecedented case against the Irish government. Appearing in Geneva before the Committee Against Torture in 2011, O’Rourke argued that Ireland had allowed the enslavement and forced labor of thousands of women throughout most of the 20th century. What she wanted, she told the committee, was for the government to acknowledge its complicity, to apologize and to pay reparations to the victims.

Brown uses her own example—after leaving a law partnership upon the birth of her daughter, she is now a professor of business law—and those of many others, from a jewelry designer to a nurse to a rabbi, to show the possibilities for those who are unhappy with the practice of law. Such a change is not easy, but a lawyer’s skills can be reframed and refreshed, she says, adding that she has never met a former lawyer who regrets having left the profession.